BME/CENG/ELEC/SENG 499 Projects

Supervisors: Thomas Darcie and Stephen Neville

Title: Entrepreneurship - Projects 1 - 7

Background:

Entrepreneurship@UVic has been operating since 2009, taking teams of Master's students through a real start-up process - 5 companies are in the pipeline, all co-owned by our founding student teams and successfully generating revenue and employment opportunities (roughly 85 employees and growing, see referralsaasquatch.com, tutelatechnologies.com, encepta.net, pretiointeractive.com, echosec.net).

We are in the process of expanding E@UVic to get undergraduate students engaged in learning about entrepreneurship. This will include the development of a new 4th-year project course that presents the opportunity to

lead a challenging project aligned with the start-up process,

work alongside experienced entrepreneur mentors,

enjoy numerous meet-and-greet opportunities with local entrepreneurial business leaders,

participate in seminars targeting various aspects of the start-up process, and

shape their personal soft skills for effective teamwork.

While this new course is not scheduled formally until 2017, we seek to preview its content and delivery while building the relationships needed with local business partners by offering this trial within the 499 course framework.

How it works:

Students enrolled ELEC/CENG 499 simply elect one of the Entrepreneurship Projects listed below.

Students may enroll as a team, or individuals will be formed into teams.

Projects are similar to regular 499 projects, but with much stronger alignment with business/customer interest during project formation and execution.

Emphasis is placed on relationships between team members and with customers, soft skills, planning, project tracking and delivery.

Student learning outcomes will include technical aspects commensurate with typical 499 projects as well as understanding what it takes to productize ideas and what it means to work on a start-up team.

Projects:

Project 1. TD1SN1. Multi-tenanted Morphia
Morphia is an open-source Mongo ORM that provides a lightweight method for serializing/deserializing Java to/from MongoDB documents. Currently, Referral SaaSquatch uses a much older version of Morphia that has been forked. This fork has been modified to support a multi-tenanted data schema. The modifications provide a mechanism for separating different tenants' data into separate collections. The older Morphia project is no longer being maintained and is incompatible with the current MongoDB project. The goal of this project is to customize the MongoDB Morphia project so that it can support multi-tenanting across collections. Ideally this would be done in a way that could be integrated back into the open source project rather than maintaining a separate fork. Participants in this project would be exposed to Java development and MongoDB concepts.

For info on the Morphia Project:
https://github.com/mongodb/morphia

Project 2. TD2SN2. Webhook EmailsReferral SaaSquatch has a webhook system which delivers JSON payloads to endpoints in response to system events. SaaSquatch also has a content templating system that is used, among other things, to customize e-mail content. Currently, there are just a few, statically defined e-mail types that are available. The goal of this project is to develop a system which maps webhooks to e-mail templates, thus significantly increasing the types of e-mails that can be sent. Participants in this project would be exposed to concepts including microservices, REST, full stack development, distributed application design, JSON schema and various programming/scripting languages.

A high level overview of what this architecture might look like is as follows:
User Created Event/Webhook -> REST API -> E-mail Template -> E-mail Delivery

Project 3. TD3SN3. Configurable Reward Logic EngineThis project would involve building a microservice that would support a configurable set of conditions dictating when and what types of rewards should be given to a user based on incoming events. The microservice would integrate with Referral SaaSquatch using its webhook and REST API's. The microservice would subscribe to SaaSquatch webhooks and rewards would be allocated via the SaaSquatch REST API. Participants of this project would be exposed to full stack development, microservices, REST and various programming/scripting languages.

Project 4. TD4SN4. OCR API/MicroserviceEchosec seeks to develop a prototype micro-service that conducts optical character recognition on an image. A basic web based application that will accept an image URL and return the text in the image as a string in a JSON object. While multi-language is ideal, English should be the primary focus. As part of working with the team, we will teach you how you might market and monetize the micro-service. We will also provide a small budget to pay for PaaS and SaaS products consumed during the project.

Project 5. TD5SN5. Image FilteringEchosec seeks to develop a prototype micro-service that will detect a specific object within an image. This classifier could detect coffee cups, plates, cutlery, handguns, or a specific logo etc. The web application will accept an image URL and return a probability the object exists within the image as a JSON object. This project will be used to help filter images within social media data. As part of working with the team, we will teach you how you might market and monetize the micro-service. We will also provide a small budget to pay for PaaS and SaaS products consumed during the project.

Project 6. TD6SN6. Safe Search (this one might not be 'school' appropriate)Echosec seeks to develop a prototype microservice that will classify social media posts based on standard Google 'Safe Search' guidelines. The microservice can detect and filter images and text for a likelihood that it is inappropriate (film rating 18+). This would include excessive vulgarity or explicit images. The web application will accept a post contents (image or text) URL and return a probability the object exceeds an vulgarity threshold as a JSON object. As part of working with the team, we will teach you how you might market and monetize the micro-service. We will also provide a small budget to pay for PaaS and SaaS products consumed during the project.

Project 7. TD7SN7. Lat/Long -> TimezoneEchosec seeks to develop a prototype microservice that determines which lat/long coordinates exist in which timezone. The microservice must be capable of handling large batches of at least 300 queries provided by JSON object bundles. The service will then take these Lat/Long and UTC timezone tupels, then find and return the corresponding timezone and local time. The microservice must also not use Google resources or another rate limited resource. As part of working with the team, we will teach you how you might market and monetize the micro-service. We will also provide a small budget to pay for PaaS and SaaS products consumed during the project.